By Graham Harris

“We must take care of our garden” Voltaire in “Candide” (1759)

While gardening has become incredibly popular in many countries in recent years; and everything from garden centres to visiting and restoring historical gardens have become big business [1], gardeners are not it seems a deeply reflective and philosophical lot. There are many excellent texts on garden design and the way it has changed over time on various continents [2], and while the literature on gardening and garden design is vast, the literature on the philosophy of gardens is rather small. Do we think deeply enough about what we are doing? Some do [3], but not that many.
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By Graham Harris

Just a week after I wrote my last blog about unsupervised learning, cognitive science and Andy Clark’s “predictive processing” an article appears in the New Scientist magazine entitled “Reality? It’s what you make it” [i].

This piece, by Philip Ball, discusses some very new ideas in quantum theory that go under the general title of participatory realism [ii]. This new concept, championed by Christopher Fuchs, Markus Müller and others, argues that the world, as we experience it from a first person perspective, is the emergent property arising from something much deeper, more complex and mysterious than we can imagine. On his web site Müller asks “Can we have a fully information-theoretic approach to physics in which not a notion of “external world”, but of “observation” is the fundamental starting point?” [iii]. It seems we can.

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By Graham Harris

In this blog I want to pull some threads together that I have written about previously and I will to try to make some bigger-picture connections. I am going to link cybernetics to embodiment and unsupervised learning in living systems.

Once we make the philosophical step of moving from 1st order cybernetics (rationalist and naïve realist science) to 2nd order cybernetics (with the observer in the loop) then we start down a path with significant consequences. Not, I might add, a complete move away from science (to head off the immediate scientific criticisms of subjectivity and muddled thinking).
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